"Mitigating carbon emissions will ruin the economy." A host of wait-and-see stalling techniques have arisen out of fear that taking decisive action now to reduce emissions will throw us into an economic depression or back to the stone age. We point the finger, asking why we should take action when other countries aren't. We also imagine that fossil fuel supplies are so vast that we will never run out of them – at least not for many centuries. Viable solutions remain under-developed in lieu of debates about population being the "real" problem, carbon offsets being unfeasible, renewable energy being too limited or carbon-capture-and-storage being are unworkable, and peak oil and other resource crunches being a myth. We look to some future technology or geo-engineering solution saving the day. This seminar looks at what approaches are available to us now, what energy futures are possible, and how much they will really cost us to implement.